..This effort will require development of universal approaches to hypothesize demarcations of ecotypes, and to confirm and characterize their ecological distinctness, without prior knowledge of a given clade's ecology...

..These molecular methods suggest that a typical named species contains many ecotypes, each with the universal attributes of species. A named bacterial species is thus more like a genus than a species...

Accuracy and efficiency of algorithms for the demarcation of bacterial ecotypes from DNA sequence data

..Unfortunately, it was also shown to be the least efficient of the four. While ecotype simulation is the most accurate, it is by a large margin the slowest of the algorithms tested. Attempts at improving its efficiency are underway. ..

Origins of bacterial diversity through horizontal genetic transfer and adaptation to new ecological niches